what can education learn from the arts about the practice of education?

Elliot W. Eisner argues that the distinctive forms of thinking needed to
create artistically crafted work are relevant not only to what students do, they
are relevant to virtually all aspects of what we do, from the design of
curricula, to the practice of teaching, to the features of the environment in
which students and teachers live. [Originally given as the John Dewey Lecture
for 2002, Stanford University.]

Before
I begin my remarks I want to express my gratitude to the Dewey Society for
inviting me to deliver this address. It’s the third time I have been asked
to do so. The first invitation came from the University of Chicago in 1976,
the second from the Dewey Society in 1979 and the third this year. I regard
the invitation as both a pleasure and a privilege. For both the pleasure and
the privilege I thank you.

I want to talk with you today about what education might learn from the
arts about the practice of education. In many ways the idea that education
has something to learn from the arts cuts across the grain of our
traditional beliefs about how to improve educational practice.

Our field, the field of education, has predicated its practices on a
platform of scientifically grounded knowledge, at least as an aspiration.
The arts and artistry as sources of improved educational practice are
considered, at best, a fall back position, a court of last resort, something
you retreat to when there is no science to provide guidance. It is widely
believed that no field seeking professional respectability can depend on
such an undependable source.

Despite prevailing doubts I intend to examine what a conception of
practice rooted in the arts might contribute to the improvement of both the
means and ends of education. What I want to do is to foreshadow the grounds
for a view of education that differs in fundamental ways from the one that
now prevails. To do this I will be describing the forms thinking the arts
evoke and their relevance for re-framing our conception of what education
might try to accomplish. To secure a perspective for the analysis,
let’s first look at the historical context within which our current
assumptions about reliable and effective practice have been based.

The development of a technicized cognitive culture

As we know when, in the fourth quarter of the 19th century, education was
coming into its own as a field of study it received its initial guidance
from psychology. It was the early psychologists who were interested in
making psychology a scientific enterprise, one that emulated the work done
in the so-called “hard sciences.” Their aim was to develop a physics of
psychology; what they called psychophysics and, consistent with their
mission, made laboratories rather than studios the venues for their work.[1]
People like Galton in England and Helmholtz and Fechner in Germany were
among its leaders and even William James, Charles Spearman, and G. Stanley
Hall made passage to Europe to learn the secrets and methods of those
seeking to create a science of mind. One example of the faith placed in a
science of psychology can be found in Edward L. Thorndike’s 1910 lead
article in the Journal of Educational Psychology. He writes:

A complete science of psychology would tell every fact about everyone’s
intellect and character and behavior, would tell the cause of every
change in human nature, would tell the result of every educational
force--every act of every person that changed any other or the person
himself--would have. It would aid us to use human beings for the world’s
welfare with the same surety of the result that we now have when we use
falling bodies or chemical elements. In proportion as we get such a
science we shall become the masters of our own souls as we now are
masters of heat and light. Progress toward such a science is being made.
[2]

Thorndike’s optimism was not shared by all. James and
Dewey, for example, had reservations
regarding what science could provide to so artful an enterprise as teaching.
Never-the-less, by the end of the first quarter of the 20th century the die
was cast. Except for some independent schools, Thorndike won and Dewey lost.[3]
Metaphorically speaking, schools were to become effective and efficient
manufacturing plants. Indeed, the language of manufacture was a part of the
active vocabulary of Thorndike, Taylor, Cubberly and others in the social
efficiency movement. In their vision of education students were raw material
to be processed according to specifications prescribed by supervisors
trained in Fredrick Taylor’s time and motion study.[4]

I suspect that even teachers working during the first quarter of the 20th
century could not be coaxed into employing wholeheartedly the Taylorisms
that were prescribed. Yet for many, especially for those in school
administration, the managed and hyper-rationalized educational world that
Fredrick Taylor envisioned became the methodological ideal needed to create
effective and efficient schools.[5]

The influence of psychology on education had another fall-out. In the
process science and art became estranged. Science was considered dependable,
the artistic process was not. Science was cognitive, the arts were
emotional. Science was teachable, the arts required talent. Science was
testable, the arts were matters of preference. Science was useful and the
arts were ornamental. It was clear to many then as it is to many today
which side of the coin mattered. As I said, one relied on art when there was
no science to provide guidance. Art was a fall-back position.

These beliefs and the vision of education they adumbrate are not
altogether alien to the contemporary scene. We live at time that puts a
premium on the measurement of outcomes, on the ability to predict them, and
on the need to be absolutely clear about what we want to accomplish. To
aspire for less is to court professional irresponsibility. We like our
data hard and our methods stiff—we call it rigor.

From a social perspective it is understandable why tight controls,
accountability in terms of high stakes testing, and the pre-specification of
intended outcomes—standards they are called—should have such attractiveness.
When the public is concerned about the educational productivity of its
schools the tendency, and it is a strong one, is to tighten up, to mandate,
to measure, and to manage. The teacher’s ability to exercise professional
discretion is likely to be constrained when the public has lost confidence
in its schools.

It does not require a great leap of imagination or profound insight to
recognize that the values and visions that have driven education during the
first quarter of the 20th century are reappearing with a vengeance today. We
look for “best methods” as if they were independent of context; we do more
testing than any nation on earth; we seek curriculum uniformity so parents
can compare their schools with other schools, as if test scores were good
proxies for the quality of education. We would like nothing more than to get
teaching down to a science even though the conception of science being
employed has little to do with what science is about. What we are now doing
is creating an industrial culture in our schools, one whose values are
brittle and whose conception of what’s important narrow. We flirt with
payment by results, we pay practically no attention to the idea that
engagement in school can and should provide intrinsic satisfactions, and we
exacerbate the importance of extrinsic rewards by creating policies that
encourage children to become point collectors. Achievement has triumphed
over inquiry. I think our children deserve more.

The technically rationalized industrial culture I speak of did not begin
with psychology; it began with the Enlightenment. The move by Galileo from
attention to the qualitative to a focus on the quantification of
relationships was, as Dewey points out, not merely a modification in method;
it was a conceptual revolution.[6]
It represented a fundamental shift in the way the world was viewed and
represented. According to philosopher and historian of science Stephen
Toulmin the shift was from attention to the timely to attention to the
timeless, from an emphasis on the oral to an emphasis on the written, from
attention to the particular to the pursuit of the universal.[7]

The calculation of relations and the search for order represented the
highest expression of our rationality. The ability to use what one learned
about nature in order to harness it to our will was another. Rationality
during the Enlightenment was closer in spirit to the proportions of the
Parthanon than to the expressive contours of the Sistine ceiling. This
search for order, this desire for efficiency, this need to control and
predict were then and are dominant values today. They are values that
pervaded the industrial revolution and they are values that reside tacitly
beneath current efforts at school reform. Current educational policy
expressed in President Bush’s 26 billion dollar educational reform agenda is
an effort to create order, to tidy up a complex system, to harness nature,
so to speak, so that our intentions can be efficiently realized.

There is of course virtue in having intentions and the ability to realize
them. What is troublesome is the push towards uniformity, uniformity in
aims, uniformity in content, uniformity in assessment, uniformity in
expectation. Of course for technocrats uniformity is a blessing; it gets rid
of complications—or so it is believed. Statistics can be a comfort; they
abstract the particular out of existence. For example, we comfort ourselves
in the belief that we are able to describe just what every fourth grader
should know and be able to do by the time they leave the fourth grade. To do
this we reify an image of an average fourth grader. Of course very few
policy makers have ever visited Ms. Purtle’s fourth grade classroom where
they might encounter red headed Mickey Malone. Mickey is no statistic. As I
said particulars like Mickey Malone complicate life, but they also enrich
it.

The point of my remarks thus far is to identify the roots of the
increasingly technicized cognitive culture in which we operate. This culture
is so ubiquitous we hardly see it. And it is so powerful that even when we
do recognize it too few of us say anything. What President Bush has said
about our students also applies to us: When the bandwagon starts rolling we
too don’t want to be left behind.

As you can tell I am not thrilled with the array of values and
assumptions that drive our pursuit of improved schools. I am not sure we can
tinker towards Utopia and get there. Nor do I believe we can mount a
revolution. What we can do is to generate other visions of education, other
values to guide its realization, other assumptions on which a more generous
conception of the practice of schooling can be built. That is, although I do
not think revolution is an option, ideas that inspire new visions, values,
and especially new practices are. It is one such vision, one that cuts
across the grain, that I wish to explore with you today.

The contours of this new vision were influenced by the ideas of Sir
Herbert Read, an English art historian, poet, and pacifist working during
the middle of the last century.[8]
He argued and I concur that the aim of education ought to be conceived of as
the preparation of artists. By the term artist neither he nor I mean
necessarily painters and dancers, poets and playwrights. We mean individuals
who have developed the ideas, the sensibilities, the skills, and the
imagination to create work that is well proportioned, skilfully executed,
and imaginative, regardless of the domain in which an individual works. The
highest accolade we can confer upon someone is to say that he or she is an
artist whether as a carpenter or a surgeon, a cook or an engineer, a
physicist or a teacher. The fine arts have no monopoly on the artistic.

I further want to argue that the distinctive forms of thinking needed to
create artistically crafted work are relevant not only to what students do,
they are relevant to virtually all aspects of what we do, from the design of
curricula, to the practice of teaching, to the features of the environment
in which students and teachers live.

Artistically rooted forms of
intelligence

What are these distinctive forms of thinking, these artistically rooted
qualitative forms of intelligence? Let me describe six of them for you and
the way they might play out in school.

1. Experiencing qualitative relationships and making judgements

Consider first the task of working on a painting, a poem, a musical
score. That task requires, perhaps above all else, the ability to compose
qualitative relationships that satisfy some purpose. That is, what a
composer composes are relationships among a virtually infinite number of
possible sound patterns. A painter has a similar task. The medium and
sensory modality differ but the business of composing relationships remains.
To succeed the artist needs to see, that is, to experience the qualitative
relationships that emerge in his or her work and to make judgments about
them.

Making judgments about how qualities are to be organized does not depend
upon fealty to some formula; there is nothing in the artistic treatment of a
composition like the making and matching activity in learning to spell or
learning to use algorithms to prove basic arithmetic operations. In spelling
and in arithmetic there are correct answers, answers whose correctness can
be proven. In the arts judgments are made in the absence of rule. Of course
there are styles of work that do serve as models for work in the various
arts but what constitutes the right qualitative relationships for any
particular work is idiosyncratic to the particular work. The temperature of
a color might be a tad too warm, the edge of a shape might be a bit too
sharp, the percussion might need to be a little more dynamic. What the arts
teach is that attention to such matters matter. The arts teach students to
act and to judge in the absence of rule, to rely on feel, to pay attention
to nuance, to act and appraise the consequences of one’s choices and to
revise and then to make other choices. Getting these relationships right
requires what Nelson Goodman calls “rightness of fit.”[9]
Artists and all who work with the composition of qualities try to achieve a
“rightness of fit.”

Given the absence of a formula or an algorithm, how are judgments about
rightness made? I believe they depend upon somatic knowledge, the sense of
closure that the good gestalt engenders in embodied experience; the
composition feels right. Work in the arts cultivates the modes of
thinking and feeling that I have described; one cannot succeed in the arts
without such cognitive abilities. Such forms of thought integrate feeling
and thinking in ways that make them inseparable. One knows one is right
because one feels the relationships. One modifies one’s work and feels the
results. The sensibilities come into play and in the process become refined.
Another way of putting it is that as we learn in and through the arts we
become more qualitatively intelligent.

Learning to pay attention to the way in which form is configured is a
mode of thought that can be applied to all things made, theoretical or
practical. How a story is composed in the context of the language
arts, how an historian composes her argument, how a scientific theory is
constructed, all of these forms of human creation profit from attention to
the way the elements that constitute them are configured. We need to help
students learn to ask not only what someone is saying, but how
someone has constructed an argument, a musical score, or a visual
image. Curriculum activities can be designed that call attention to such
matters, activities that refine perception in each of the fields we teach.
This will require activities that slow down perception rather than speed it
up.

Much of our perception, perhaps most of it, is highly focal. We tend to
look for particular things in our perceptual field. The virtue of such
a mode of attention is that it enables us to find what we are looking for.
The potential vice of such perception is that it impedes our awareness of
relationships. The up and back movement of the visitor to the art
gallery when looking at a painting is an example of an effort to secure both
focal awareness and attention to configuration. Teachers perform similar
activities. One of the important tasks of teaching is to be able to focus on
the individual while attending to the larger classroom patterns of which the
individual is a part. To complicate matters these patterns change over time.
The good teacher, like the good short order cook, has to pay attention to
several operations simultaneously, and they do.

2. Flexible purposing

A second lesson that education can learn from the arts pertains to the
formulation of aims. In western models of rational decision-making the
formulation of aims, goals, objectives, or standards is a critical act;
virtually all else that follows depends upon the belief that one must have
clearly defined ends: Once ends are conceptualized means are formulated,
then implemented, and then outcomes are evaluated. If there is a discrepancy
between aspiration and accomplishment, new means are formulated. The cycle
continues until xz ends and outcomes are isomorphic. Ends are held
constant and always are believed to precede means.

But is this true? In the arts it certainly is not. In the arts ends may
follow means. One may act and the act may itself suggest ends, ends that did
not precede the act, but follow it. In this process ends shift; the work
yields clues that one pursues. In a sense, one surrenders to what the work
in process suggests. This process of shifting aims while doing the work at
hand is what Dewey called “flexible purposing.”[10]
Flexible purposing is opportunistic; it capitalizes on the emergent features
appearing within a field of relationships. It is not rigidly attached to
predefined aims when the possibility of better ones emerge. The kind of
thinking that flexible purposing requires thrives best in an environment in
which the rigid adherence to a plan is not a necessity. As experienced
teachers well know, the surest road to hell in a classroom is to stick to
the lesson plan no matter what.

The pursuit, or at least the exploitation of surprise in an age of
accountability is paradoxical. As I indicated earlier, we place a much
greater emphasis on prediction and control than on exploration and
discovery. Our inclination to control and predict is, at a practical
level, understandable, but it also exacts a price; we tend to do the things
we know how to predict and control. Opening oneself to the uncertain
is not a pervasive quality of our current educational environment. I
believe that it needs to be among the values we cherish. Uncertainty needs
to have its proper place in the kinds of schools we create.

How can the pursuit of surprise be promoted in a classroom? What kind of
classroom culture is needed? How can we help our students view their work as
temporary experimental accomplishments, tentative resting places subject to
further change? How can we help them work at the edge of incompetence? These
are some the questions that this aim suggests we ask.

3. Form and content is most often inextricable

A third lesson the arts can teach education is that form and content is
most often inextricable. How something is said is part and parcel of what is
said. The message is in the form-content relationship, a relationship that
is most vivid in the arts. To recognize the relationship of form and content
in the arts is not to deny that for some operations in some fields form and
content can be separated. I think of beginning arithmetic, say the addition
of two numbers such as 4+ 4. The sum of the numerals 4+4 can be expressed in
literally an infinite number of ways: 8, eight, //// ////, VIII, 300,000-
299,992 and so forth. In all of these examples the arithmetic conclusion, 8,
is the same regardless of the form used to represent it. But for most of
what we do form-content relations do matter. How history is written
matters, how one speaks to a child matters, what a classroom
looks like matters, how one tells a story matters. Getting it right
means creating a form whose content is right for some purpose. The
architecture of a school can look and feel like a factory or like a home. If
we want children to feel like factory workers our schools should look and
feel like factories. Form and content matter and in such cases are
inseparable.

Indeed, the discovery that form and content are inseparable is one of the
lessons the arts teach most profoundly. Change the cadence in a line of
poetry and you change the poem’s meaning. The creation of expressive and
satisfying relationships is what artistically guided work celebrates.

In the arts there is no substitutability among elements (because there
are no separate elements), in math there is. The absence of substitutability
promotes attention to the particular. Developing an awareness of the
particular is especially important for those of us who teach since the
distinctive character of how we teach is a pervasive aspect of what we
teach. The current reform movement would do well to pay more attention to
the messages its policies send to students since those messages may
undermine deeper educational values. The values about which I speak include
the promotion of self initiated learning, the pursuit of alternative
possibilities, and the anticipation of intrinsic satisfactions secured
through the use of the mind. Do we really believe that league tables
published in the newspaper displaying school performance is a good way to
understand what schools teach or that the relentless focus on raising test
scores is a good way to insure quality education? The form we use to display
data shapes its meaning.

4. Not everything knowable can be articulated in propositional form

Closely related to the form-content relationship is a fourth lesson the
arts can teach education. It is this. Not everything knowable can be
articulated in propositional form. The limits of our cognition are not
defined by the limits of our language. We have a long philosophic tradition
in the West that promotes the view that knowing anything requires some
formulation of what we know in words; we need to have warrants for our
assertions. But is it really the case that what we cannot assert we cannot
know? Not according to
Michael Polanyi who speaks of tacit knowledge and says “We know more
than we can tell.”[11]
And Dewey tells us that while science states meaning, the arts express
meaning. Meaning is not limited to what is assertable. Dewey goes on to say
that that the aesthetic cannot be separated from the intellectual for the
intellectual to be complete it must bear the stamp of the aesthetic.
Having a nose for telling questions and a feel for incisive answers are not
empty metaphors.

These ideas not only expand our conception of the ways in which we know,
they expand our conception of mind. They point to the cognitive frontiers
that our teaching might explore. How can we help students recognize the ways
in which we express and recover meaning, not only in the arts but in the
sciences as well? How can we introduce them to the art of doing
science? After all, the practice of any practice, including science, can be
an art.

It’s clear to virtually everyone that we appeal to expressive form to say
what literal language can never say. We build shrines to express our
gratitude to the heroes of 9/11 because somehow we find our words
inadequate. We appeal to poetry when we bury and when we marry. We situate
our most profound religious practices within compositions we have
choreographed. What does our need for such practices say to us about the
sources of our understanding and what do they mean for how we educate? At a
time when we seem to want to package performance into standardized
measurable skill sets questions such as these seem to me to be especially
important. The more we feel the pressure to standardize, the more we need to
remind ourselves of what we should not try to standardize.

5. Looking to the medium

A fifth lesson we can learn from the arts about the practice of education
pertains to the relationship between thinking and the material with which we
and our students work. In the arts it is plain that in order for a work to
be created we must think within the constraints and affordances of the
medium we elect to use. The flute makes certain qualities possible that the
bass fiddle will never produce, and vice versa. Painting with watercolor
makes certain visual qualities possible that cannot be created with oil
paint. The artist’s task is to exploit the possibilities of the medium in
order to realize aims he or she values. Each material imposes its own
distinctive demands and to use it well we have to learn to think within it.

Where are the parallels when we teach and when students learn in the
social studies, in the sciences, in the language arts? How must language and
image be treated to say what we want to say? How must a medium be treated
for the medium to mediate? How do we help students get smart with the media
they are invited to use and what are the cognitive demands that different
media make upon those who use them. Carving a sculpture out of a piece of
wood is clearly a different cognitive task than building a sculpture out of
plasticine clay. The former is a subtractive task, the latter an additive
one. Getting smart in any domain requires at the very least learning to
think within a medium. What are the varieties of media we help children get
smart about? What do we neglect?

It seems to me that the computer has a particularly promising role to
play in providing students with opportunities to learn how to think in new
ways. Assuming the programs can be developed, and it is my impression
that many already have, operations are performable on the computer that
cannot be executed through any other medium. New possibilities for
matters of representation can stimulate our imaginative capacities and can
generate forms of experience that would otherwise not exist. Indeed,
the history of art itself is, in large measure, a history studded with the
effects of new technologies. This has been at no time more visible
than during the 20th century. Artists have learned to think within
materials such as neon tubing and plastic, day glow color and corfam steel,
materials that make forms possible that Leonardo daVinci himself could not
have conceived of. Each new material offers us new affordances and
constraints and in the process develops the ways in which we think. There is
a lesson to be learned here for the ways in which we design curricula and
the sorts of materials we make it possible for students to work with.

Decisions we make about such matters have a great deal to do with the
kinds of minds we develop in school. Minds, unlike brains, are not entirely
given at birth; minds are also forms of cultural achievement. The kinds of
minds we develop are profoundly influenced by the opportunities to learn
that the school provides. And this is the point of my remarks about what
education might learn from the arts. The kinds of thinking I have described,
and it is only a sample, represents the kind of thinking I believe schools
should promote. The promotion of such thinking requires not only a shift in
perspective regarding our educational aims, it represents a shift in the
kind of tasks we invite students to undertake, the kind of thinking we ask
them to do, and the kind of criteria we apply to appraise both their work
and ours. Artistry, in other words, can be fostered by how we design the
environments we inhabit. The lessons the arts teach are not only for our
students, they are for us as well.

Winston Churchill once said that first we design our buildings and then
our buildings design us. To paraphrase Churchill we can say,
first we design our curriculum then our curriculum designs us. What I think
many of us want is not only a form of educational practice whose features,
so to speak, “design us,” but a form of educational practice that enables
students to learn how to design themselves. Thus it might be said that at
its best education is a process of learning how to become the architect of
our own education. It is a process that does not terminate until we do.

6. The aesthetic satisfactions that the work itself makes possible

Finally, we come to motives for engagement. In the arts motives tend to
be secured from the aesthetic satisfactions that the work itself makes
possible. A part of these satisfactions is related to the challenge that the
work presents; materials resist the maker, they have to be crafted and this
requires an intense focus on the modulation of forms as they emerge in a
material being processed. This focus is often so intense that all sense of
time is lost. The work and the worker become one. At times it is the tactile
quality of the medium that matters, its feel, the giving and resisting
quality of the clay. At other times it is the changing relationships among
fields of color. The arts, in a sense, are supermarkets for the senses. But
the arts are far more than supermarkets for sensory gourmets. In the arts
there is an idea which the work embodies. For the impressionists the idea
was light, for the surrealists it was the unconscious, for the cubists it
was time and space, for the American regionalists of the 1930's it was the
ordinary lives of ordinary people that was celebrated. These interests
provided direction to the work but the quality of the work was always
appraised by what it did within experience.

The arts are, in the end, a special form of experience, but if there is
any point I wish to emphasize it is that the experience the arts make
possible is not restricted to what we call the fine arts. The sense of
vitality and the surge of emotion we feel when touched by one of the arts
can also be secured in the ideas we explore with students, in the challenges
we encounter in doing critical inquiry, and in the appetite for learning we
stimulate. In the long run these are the satisfactions that matter most
because they are the only ones that insure, if it can be insured at all,
that what we teach students will want to pursue voluntarily after the
artificial incentives so ubiquitous in our schools are long forgotten. It is
in this sense especially that the arts can serve as a model for education.

The agenda I have proposed gives rise to more than a few questions. One
is whether a conception of education that uses art as its regulative ideal
is realistic? Is it asking for too much? My answer is that ideals are always
out of reach. It is no different for education’s ideals. The arts provide
the kind of ideal that I believe American education needs now more than
ever. I say now more than ever because our lives increasingly require the
ability to deal with conflicting messages, to make judgements in the absence
of rule, to cope with ambiguity, and to frame imaginative solutions to the
problems we face. Our world is not one that submits to single correct
answers to questions or clear cut solutions to problems; consider what’s
going on in the Middle East. We need to be able not only to envision fresh
options, we need to have feel for the situations in which they appear. In a
word, the forms of thinking the arts stimulate and develop are far more
appropriate for the real world we live in than the tidy right angled boxes
we employ in our schools in the name of school improvement.

The creation of a new culture of schooling

This brings us to the final portion of my remarks. Thus far I have tried
to describe my concerns about our current efforts to use highly rationalized
standardized procedures to reform education and to describe their historical
roots. I then advanced the notion that genuine change depends upon a vision
of education that is fundamentally different from the one that guides
today’s efforts at school reform. I proposed that education might well
consider thinking about the aim of education as the preparation of artists
and I proceeded to describe the modes of thinking the arts evoke, develop
and refine. These forms of thinking, as I indicated earlier, relate to
relationships that when acted upon require judgment in the absence of rule,
they encourage students and teachers to be flexibly purposive; (its O.K. for
aims to shift in process), they recognize the unity of form and content,
they require one to think within the affordances and constraints of the
medium one elects to use and they emphasize the importance of aesthetic
satisfactions as motives for work. In addition, I alluded to some of the
locations in the context of schooling in which those forms of thinking might
be developed.

In describing some of the forms of thinking the arts occasion, of
necessity I had to fragment what is a seamless, unified process. I want
therefore to emphasis here that I am not talking about the implementation of
isolated curriculum activities, but rather, the creation of a new culture of
schooling that has as much to do with the cultivation of dispositions as
with the acquisition of skills.

At the risk of propagating dualisms, but in the service of emphasis, I am
talking about a culture of schooling in which more importance is placed on
exploration than on discovery, more value is assigned to surprise than to
control, more attention is devoted to what is distinctive than to what is
standard, more interest is related to what is metaphorical than to what is
literal. It is an educational culture that has a greater focus on becoming
than on being, places more value on the imaginative than on the factual,
assigns greater priority to valuing than to measuring, and regards the
quality of the journey as more educationally significant than the speed at
which the destination is reached. I am talking about a new vision of what
education might become and what schools are for.

Conclusion

I want to bring my remarks to a close by reminding all of us here that
visions, no matter how grand, need to be acted upon to become real. Ideas,
clearly, are important. Without them change has no rudder. But change also
needs wind and a sail to catch it. Without them there is no movement.
Frankly, this may be the most challenging aspect of the proposal I have
made. The public’s perception of the purpose of education supports the
current paradigm. We need to sail against the tide.

Our destination is to change the social vision of what schools can be. It
will not be an easy journey but when the seas seem too treacherous to travel
and the stars too distant to touch we should remember Robert Browning’s
observation that “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven
for.”[12]

Browning gives us a moral message, one generated by the imagination and
expressed through the poetic. And as Dewey said in the closing pages of
Art as Experience, “Imagination is the chief instrument of the
good.” Dewey went on to say that, “Art has been the means of keeping alive
the sense of purposes that outrun evidence and of meanings that transcend
indurated habit.”[13]

Imagination is no mere ornament, nor is art. Together they can liberate
us from our indurated habits. They might help us restore decent purpose to
our efforts and help us create the kind of schools our children deserve and
our culture needs. Those aspirations, my friends, are stars worth stretching
for.

Further reading and bibliography

[1]. Edwin Boring, A History of Experimental
Psychology, Third Edition. New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1957.